Crooks and gun laws

“When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns,” goes the familiar mantra of Second Amendment zealots.

To a great extent, this is a truism. But not an entirely true truism.

There are statistics that must be acknowledged as a significant footnote to the mantra that lawbreakers will, by definition, ignore gun laws.

Tens of thousands of lawbreakers annually submit to background checks in their attempts to buy firearms and are blocked from doing so. It’s reasonable to surmise therefore that scores, hundreds, maybe even thousands of firearms crimes, including violent and/or lethal ones, are thereby averted.

Why the felonious would submit to background checks beats us. Maybe it’s as the cops say, that the criminal community aren’t, by and large, at the top of the class.

Whatever the explanation, Dept. of Justice data for 1993-2009 reveal significant numbers of potentially dangerous gun shoppers flagged by background checks under the federal Brady law with all its loopholes.

The denials include the following numbers:

— Flagged due to felony convictions or indictments, 904,904.

— Flagged due to domestic violence cases, 237,323.

— Flagged due to fugitive warrants, 101,001.

— Flagged due to drug cases, 77,420.

— Flagged due to mental cases, 28,637.

— Flagged as illegal aliens, 13,322.

The numbers offer a glimmer of hope that a bipartisan background check expansion proposed by Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., and Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W. Va., will have at least an incrementally positive effect on public safety and maybe even a positive effect beyond incremental.

Tweaking the tollHomicide numbers get a lot of attention in the gun-control debate, as they should. But actually firearms homicides have been trending downward, from 18,253 in 1993 to 11,493 in 2009.

A larger firearms number gets little or no attention in the debate — firearms suicides. They routinely outnumber homicides and have remained more or less steady over the years, from 18,940 in 1993 to 18,735 in 2009. Accidental firearms deaths have been in the 500 to 600 per-year range in recent years. (Data from National Center for Health Statistics.)

Total firearms fatalities have been in the 30,000 to 31,000 per-year range after a peak of 39,596 in 1993. (Cf. traffic deaths, 2010: 32,788.)

If as estimated there are 300 million firearms in America, then the 31,347 total firearms deaths in 2009 works out to a rate of — what? Let’s get the calculator out here... And the answer is: .0001 per firearm.

Any way you tweak the numbers, however, 31,000 or so annual firearms deaths add up to a ghastly, bloody toll. Compare those numbers with, say, the estimated American casualties for D-Day, 5,590, or Guadalcanal, (recalled as the “Island of Death”) 1,592.